Contents

CFError

Declaration

class CFError

Overview

A CFError object encapsulates more rich and extensible error information than is possible using only an error code or error string. The core attributes of a CFError object are an error domain (represented by a string), a domain-specific error code, and a “user info” dictionary containing application-specific information. Errors are required to have a domain and an error code within that domain. Several well-known domains are defined corresponding to Mach, POSIX, and OSStatus errors.

The optional “user info” dictionary may provide additional information that might be useful for the interpretation and reporting of the error, including a human-readable description for the error. The “user info” dictionary sometimes includes another CFError object that represents an error in a subsystem underlying the error represented by the containing CFError object. This underlying error object may provide more specific information about the cause of the error.

In general, a method should signal an error condition by returning, for example, false or NULL rather than by the simple presence of an error object. The method can then optionally return an CFError object by reference, in order to further describe the error.

CFError is toll-free bridged to NSError in the Foundation framework—for more details on toll-free bridging, see Toll-Free Bridged Types. NSError has some additional guidelines that make it easy to report errors automatically to users and attempt to recover from them. See Error Handling Programming Guide for more information on NSError programming guidelines.

Topics

Creating a CFError

Getting Information About an Error

Getting the CFError Type ID

Constants

See Also

Related Documentation

  • Error Handling Programming Guide

Opaque Types